1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vacuum sintering apparatus, and particularly relates to a continuous production vacuum sintering apparatus and a vacuum sintering system adopted to the same.
2. Background of the Invention
There are several categories of a flat panel display (FPD), such as, for example a field emission display (FED), a thin film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD), a plasma display panel (PDP), an organic electro-luminescence display (OELD), or a reflection-type liquid crystal display (LCD). Thinness, lightness, low power consumption, and portability are the common features among the FPDs mentioned above. The so-called FED has many similarities with conventional cathode ray tubes (CRT). As for the CRT, electrons are accelerated in a vacuum towards phosphors, which then glows. The main difference from the CRT is that the electrons are generated by field emission rather than thermal emission, so the device consumes much less power and can be turned on instantly. Instead of one single electron gun, each pixel includes several thousands of sub-micrometer or even nanometer tips from which electrons are emitted. The tips, made of low work-function materials, in particular of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) nowadays, are sharp, so that the local field strengths become high enough for even a moderately low  gate voltage.
In a conventional CNT-FED, specific metallic material, as a cathode, such as, for example, silver, aluminum, copper or indium tin oxide, can melt at a low temperature in a low pressure or vacuum environment. A solvent with high volatility and thousands of CNTs arranged therein is patterned on the cathode. After a vacuum or low-pressure sintering process, the CNTs will be merged in the melted cathode. However, because the cathode is heated in a thermal radiation manner, the heating and sinking durations thereof are so long that the manufacturing efficiency thereof cannot increase. Since an exhaustion valve is provided to be adjacent to the conventional CNT-FED so close that an evaporation rate of the solvent will rise, this results in a low, rare adhesion density of the CNTs and a low conductivity of the conventional CNT-FED thereby.
In addition, the conventional CNT-FED now is manufactured like one-off production products due to the individual sintering system and accuracy conditions. The conventional CNT-FED is manufactured depending on either the customers' needs or the conditions' precisions to make an individual item. Each single conventional CNT-FED is processed once every time in a furnace, in a process usually suited for a pilot run. If an order for multiple conventional CNT-FEDs is received, several furnaces will individually fail with regard to quality management and suffer low manufacturing efficiency, resulting in high costs.
Hence, an improvement over the prior art is required to overcome the disadvantages thereof. 